When I saw that Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders had linked on over to Guy Kawasaki’s Ten Things to Learn This School Year to point at Guy’s assertion that business emails should be briefly written—specifically, in five sentences—I knew that I needed to write about it. One may argue that I’m influenced by my friend Stephen, who recently mocked five-paragraph essays, and I won’t deny the influence. Kawasaki is right that much in the way of business communication could well be done in the fewest number of words possible, but I do fear that there is a danger in being formulaic.

Here’s the relevant quotation from Kawasaki:

9. How to write a five-sentence email. Young people have an advantage over older people in this area because older people (like me) were taught to write letters that were printed on paper, signed, stuck in an envelope, and mailed. Writing a short email was a new experience for them. Young people, by contrast are used to IMing and chatting. If anything, they’re too skilled on brevity, but it’s easier to teach someone how to write a long message than a short one. Whether UR young or old, the point is that the optimal length of an email message is five sentences. All you should do is explain who you are, what you want, why you should get it, and when you need it by.

I find it interesting that Kawasaki himself can’t be brief—I read through several dozen words to get to the meat of his argument. Thankfully, he didn’t bury the lede, because his final sentence gets at his essentials: who, what, why, and when. I find a couple of flaws with Kawasaki’s list here: not every business email will be sent to someone unfamiliar with your who and why. At this point in my career as a middle manager, I find that I know the who quite often, and the who tells me the why they need it. [For an example: when my vice-president emails me, I know who he is, and the why he needs it matters not to me---he's the boss, so he gets it.] Externally-focused notes do indeed have a need for his information, however.

A second flaw is the emphasis on brevity. Too often, I find that a lot of business correspondence is ill-considered—a request for some Government Furnished Equipment, for example, doesn’t come with any context of what it’s needed for. Folks go on fishing expeditions for things, and when people are fishing, others are going to eye those requests very warily. There’s often a lot of context missing in requests made—one reason, I think, that top-posting is so prevalent, as Charles Miller notes:

Top-posting over entire messages actually makes sense in this context. Having the entire previous conversation available “bottom-up” at the end of the message allows anyone to read the full history of the discussion, regardless of how badly their mail-client sucks, even if they have played no part in the prior conversation. Everyone who already knows what is being discussed can just stop reading after the signature of the most recent poster.

Lastly, I think that there’s a danger in being formulaic. As previously stated, context isn’t always required. In some cases, being formulaic will actually do battle with brevity, as trying to fit an argument or assertion within the bounds of the formula will distract from the point by overly belaboring it. As my European History teacher from high school, Donald “Sonny” Renfroe, was famous for saying, “Have it be long enough to cover the subject and short enough to keep it interesting.” In fact, I myself have fallen prey to this very peril in the writing of this entry, which could certainly have been done in one paragraph rather than five.

Guy Kawasaki argues that business emails should be as brief as possible: five sentences, explaining who you are, what you want, why you need it, and when you need it by. Kawasaki makes this assertion in a larger article about ten things to learn in school—a list that actually has twelve items—and does so by belaboring the point mightily and almost boring the reader before they get to the crux of the advice. Brevity is not always the best course of advice in business correspondence—sometimes, more context is needed. This often drives us a series of back-and-forth discussion points that lengthen the conversation and bounce from user-to-user, a process that’s driven most business email to use top-posting [a practice I find personally abhorrent but regularly use in business communication]. Finally, I argue that being formulaic can often drive the writer to add in unnecessary commentary merely in the guise of fitting the formula: five paragraphs, or 1000 words, or what have you. Having written this, I have successfully gotten to the formulaic point, and I will now remove my tongue from my cheek.

Brian Lam’s iPhone review on Gizmodo has a lot of salient points: there are things that the iPhone doesn’t do that lots of other, 1/10th-the-cost phones do perform, and that the iPhone could have many of these with software updates. Therefore, he argues that people wait on buying an iPhone if they haven’t done so already until some of the updates have rolled out. That’s reasonable. I do think those rollouts will come, too—after all, the iPhone was announced with 11 apps originally, and now there are 12 in the initial production run. Looking at the home screen, the UI would easily accept four more apps without anything having to be swapped out, re-ordered, or anything. [One could argue that Apple could put any number of apps on the phone, but two things jump out at me: one, having to scroll the main UI would stink, and two, those apps would have to be small so as to not cripple the 4GB iPhone.]

But here’s what makes Lam’s review slam-worthy: the conclusion:

One more thing. What took you guys so long to review this? And where are the fanboys I know and love/hate?
Like you, I’ve coveted the idea of an Apple phone since it wasn’t any more real than a unicorn. And when it was delivered last Friday, almost seven months after the announcement at Macworld 2007, the hype and spin were so thick, there was no way anyone could write an objective review. Ten days after I camped, plunked down $600 for one, and signed the two year contract, I think I have the perspective to understand what it means to live with this phone. Many reviews abound, but I don’t think anyone has written about it from the perspective of ownership yet. That’s my take on the situation. My mind is clear; this isn’t a knee-jerk reaction.

Ten days? Really? I know that we’re living on InternetTime these days, but ten days is an eyelash blink. That’s what makes the “I want to defend the skeptical nature of this review” thing so laughable. Ten days isn’t enough time for anyone to evaluate it.

Face it: most everyone who’s bought one to this point is a gadget geek. [Check.] Whether or not the device truly has any lasting impact isn’t going to be known for some time yet—probably not even in 2007. Sure, you’re going to see brisk early sales for a device that’s this hyped—just like Hollywood blockbusters have an initial boomlet. But for an early adopter to argue that ten days gives him enough perspective … sorry, I don’t buy it.

[My initial feelings on the iPhone---with just three full days of ownership---are twofold: one, I really like using it, and two, I really like watching other people use it. But I really only care about the first in the long run; the second just strokes my considerable ego.]

Here’s today’s WikiBinge [thanks for the term, Brad]:

• Quincunical maps are “a conformal map projection [s] (except for 4 points where its conformality fails) that presents the sphere as a square.” Pretty interesting stuff, if you’re interested in map projections, as I am. [Picked up from the article on quincunxes, which I linked into from Angkor Wat after a mention of the temple on ABC World News Tonight with Charlie Gibson.
• I've spent a fair amount of time reading Antarctica-related articles lately. It really made me wonder if Emilio Marcos Palma had ever written a book about being the only child of Antarctica, but it seems that he hasn't [on Amazon.com, anyway]. I was also quite fascinated by the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition—enough to want to read a book on it, perhaps—and Lake Vostok. Any lake that’s still liquid at -3°C because of massive pressure from glacial ice above and geothermal heating below is wicked cool, regardless of what implications that has for life on Europa. “ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.” Come on … never tell engineers, “Don’t do this.” We’re gonna poke it with a stick, man.
• My senior-year high school roommate Jason sent me a friend request on Facebook today, and after accepting it, I found that he was at SUNY-Stony Brook. Hell, I didn’t know where Stony Brook was until I looked it up. I look at those median family incomes and go, “Man. Too rich for my blood.”

May you get sucked in for a good hour or two as I have.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and it seems like a fun thing to me: posting about the things that have interested me while noodling around on Wikipedia. So, hey … new category. Here’s the first installment:

• Falls Church, Virginia is the smallest city in the United States, in terms of surface area. Yes, 10,377 people lived in 2.0 square miles at the time of the 2000 Census. I mean, that’s not Manhattan-level population density, but it does make one think. You could reasonably walk the perimeter of the city in a hour or so, and … yeah.
• There are 3,077 counties in the United States, an average of 62 a state. There’s only one state with 62 counties—New York. Since when is New York average in anything?
• Jeff Tweedy sings, “It’s hot in the poor places tonight.” What are the poorest places in the United States? As someone who has lived in the twin states of Mississippi and Alabama for the last 16 years, I figured that plenty of places in those two states would be high on the list. I was wrong; South Dakota has four of the five-poorest counties in America. All four of those counties have, as you might expect, Indian reservations. Starr County, Texas, on the Mexican border, is the poorest U.S. county without a reservation in it. Mississippi’s first listing is #17, and Alabama’s is #27.

Unlike most of my Wikipedia excursions, I can actually remember how this one got started: I asked myself what the major metropolitan areas were in the Mountain Time Zone. Seeing that two Texas counties were in the Mountain Time Zone, I then got interested about counties, and … well, there it went.

What’ve you been looking at on Wikipedia lately?

So The Washington Post is running a four-part series on the influence that Dick Cheney has in the Bush Administration. I’ve read the first part today, and all I have to say is this: Dick Cheney scares the shit out of me. I really hope that whoever the next VPOTUS is turns out to be as weak and inept as Dan Quayle.

Also, the more I find out about John Ashcroft now that he’s out of office, the better he looks. I still think that he went too far, but compared with some of the people in this Administration who’ve done their best to throw away American civil liberties and large parts of the Constitution, he doesn’t seem so bad.

Makes me a little sick that I voted for these clowns. Twice.

As I listened to Ted Koppel dissect the current Iraq war funding dispute and what it means for Democrats in the future yesterday on NPR’s All Things Considered, I found myself nodding vigorously.

An aside, which has very little to do with Koppel’s auditorial …

I have been thinking, though, that mass media and one-to-many media—essentially, the media revolution of the last 30 years—is going to be the force that makes large-scale armed conflict largely irrelevant. Civilized societies largely seem to have no stomach for war when fully faced with the atrocities of same. Regardless of whether or not you buy into just war doctrine in particular [I vacillate] or as it applies to Iraq [I vacillate even more :)], you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who prefers war to the alternatives. Such folks are, generally, uncivilized, and I think the greater access to information is, in itself, a civilizing force.

And if none of this makes sense, well:

1. I’m really out of the practice of writing these days.
2. I’m dashing through this while on a lunch break right before a teleconference that starts in eight minutes.
3. I didn’t write this as a five-paragraph essay.

[And yes, Stephen, that was totally a way to draw you out for a smart remark. You may make it and then return to your pre-baby fretting.]

Okay, back to listening to roughs and demos from the new Caedmon’s album.

Both Mike and Jamie sent this to me, and … well, it’s hilarious. Clark, the Canadian hockey goalie, playing shortstop in full gear. Oh my gracious, that’s awesome.

Colter points to a wonderful documentary on YouTube on the Amen Break.

Wicked awesome.

If, like me, you’ve found yourself a fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s writing, you’ll probably enjoy the Washingtonian.com profile of Malcolm Gladwell:

“[Washington Post Business section deputy editor] Steve [Pearlstein] was a very important encouraging force for me,” Gladwell says. Pearlstein had an “open, free-ranging mind” and taught Gladwell that having a beat gave one the “freedom to explore ideas” in the course of day-to-day reporting.

Pearlstein was known for trolling around the newsroom with a clipboard on which he kept a list of reporters, what each was working on, and when their articles were due.

“Early on, we discovered that the best thing to do with Malcolm was to let him be Malcolm,” Pearlstein says. “When you’re Malcolm’s editor, you don’t worry about whether something is important—just that it’s interesting.” He left the box on his clipboard next to “Gladwell” blank.

I’ve often worried—knowing my share of journalism-school graduates—that J-school enforces a mindset of how things should be done. While there’s certainly a fair amount of rigor demanded of good journalism—asking insightful questions, fact-checking, looking at both sides—making sure that you’re checking all the boxes can well end up with the product being very rote and mechanical. Gladwell clearly injects personality into his writing, which is one reason that I really appreciate his work.

[HT to Rex Sorgatz's Fimoculous.]

Some of you know about this, and many of those have asked; Doug got a scholarship established in Cindy’s memory at William Carey University. Information on donating to the Cindy Morris Scholarship at Wiliam Carey University is available at DougMorris.org.

As someone who believes in making resolutions [and follows through on them horribly, heh], I’ll definitely be following this week’s Dethroner theme on resolutions.

As for my resolutions this year, I’m going to take a different tack: monthly goals. I found that, as the year progressed, my view of the goals I’d set at the beginning of 2006 grew dimmer. Also, I find myself a strong believer in repentance and staring anew, and a more regular focus is what I seek. I’ve always been great at short-term goals due to my procrastinative nature: the thrill of the deadline provides all the adrenaline that I need to succeed. I’ve also generally done well with long-term goals, which I pursue blindly and seem to just … sort of achieve. [I think I'd title my memoirs to date How I Became an Aerospace Engineer Without Really Trying.] But the medium-term stuff—the stuff that I’ve long held is the glue that really builds upon the short-term stuff and makes the long-term stuff happen a lot faster—is something I’ve generally sucked at in my life.

Anyhow. Go check out the Dethroner stuff. Joel Johnson’s Dethroner is one of the best new Weblogs of 2006, and his 2007 stuff promises to kick even more ass.

So, 95% of Americans have had premarital sex, and that result hasn’t changed for decades? Can I be in line with all the people saying, B.S.?

1. What’s with the strong skewing towards women? 33,000 of the 38,000 people sampled were women. That’s … not a good demographic balance.
2. The data comes from the surveys taken “in 1982, 1988, 1995 and 2002 for the federal National Survey of Family Growth”. “What’s the nature of this study?” is the question most asked by the people I’ve sent this to via email. [Especially by all my librarian friends.] We all wonder: is this study demographically skewed? Anytime you see federal studies of this sort, you wonder if they’re aimed at a demographic: we were all left wondering if it was perhaps something done with individuals who use Federal insurance safetynets [Medicare, Medicaid, etc.], stuff that skews towards low-income families and single parent households. I guess that I’m being prejudicial in assuming that low-income families are going to be more promiscuous, and if you want to skewer me for that, go ahead. But single mothers are often unwed mothers, so … that’s just the very definition of what we’re getting at here. But in any regard, I think that the larger point is that there’s concern on my end for the demography of the sample as to how it relates to the public as a whole. The AP story doesn’t give us much data on this.
3. Lastly, if you believe demographers that argue that, on the whole, people who identify as homosexual are 10% of our population, you’re accepting that there are twice as many self-identified homosexuals as there are self-identified premarital virgins. Now, I admit that, as a religiously-inclined engineer living in the American South that I’m surrounded by a population that one would presume to be more likely to count among its number the 5% minority, much less knowing folks who openly admit their homosexual identity, I … think I know a whole lot more people who claim to have stayed virgins until marriage than who identify as homosexuals.

I wouldn’t have blinked if this study had said 75%. I might not have spent much time thinking about it if it was 80-85%. But 95%? Doesn’t that just seem a little high to you?

[I'm aware that I'm allowing my own individual anecdotes affect my perceptions of this research. I guess I'm wanting to see the actual paper and the methodology to cure my skepticism.]

My friend David has recently left his engineering faculty position to return to private engineering practice; he’s promised to explain this move to us, but for now, revel in the story of driving his family out over Thanksgiving for a job interview in Nevada. It’s not Don Miller’s Through Painted Deserts, but some of those same themes are found there.

My best to you, David.

… of a place where I haven’t lived for 15 years, but I do it anyway.

I don’t know any of the people in this short news story about a grandmother who’s serving as a reading tutor at the elementary school that is now sited where her old high school was, but I attended that elementary school as a kid, and looking at the story, the second-grade teacher named was three years ahead of my brother in school. [They almost assuredly didn't know each other.]

I guess it’s comforting to see this cycle, though: all the class photos of all those old Main High School classes were up in the hallways of Main Elementary, and when I’d have idle time to roam the halls, I’d look at them, trying to get a sense of history. [It was nowhere as movie-riffic as the "Carpe ... carpe diem! scene from Dead Poets Society, I assure you, but still affected me.]

15 years after my family moved from the area, Beavercreek, Ohio is still struggling to keep city schools funded with emergency property-tax levies. [I'm posting this mostly for my family's sake, admittedly.] It never ceases to fail me how many reasons people will come up with to not pay taxes when the tax revenue is demonstrably going toward something that clearly adds value to the community. Certainly, not all taxation is equal, and some taxes are regressive and/or wholly unnecessary, but … having grown up in that school district, I can say that those folks really need it.

When we moved there more than 20 years ago, Beavercreek was an odd duck—a town mostly home to older folks whose kids had moved away, mixed in with military folks who wouldn’t be around more than four or eight years at the most. The oldtimers didn’t really want to pay taxes to educate kids who weren’t going to stay in the community, and … at some level, I guess that I can understand that. But the thing that never failed to amaze me was understanding how short-sighted this was: the military families often chose Beavercreek for its good schools. [I'm fairly sure that's why my folks moved there over, say, Fairborn, which would have been closer to where Dad worked on base for sure.] If you have good schools in a town, you typically have a good quality of life … and those military kids typically were of good stock: studious, responsible, and hard-working. Having us around reinforced the locals’ value systems, which were often the same as our own.

Now, I don’t know what the demographics of the area are anymore—I’ve really only been back once, and that was for a very quick trip. I can tell that the area has exploded in terms of growth, but if you want to be a bedroom community to Dayton [and maybe Cincinnati if you like the commuting thing], you’ve gotta have good schools. But … doesn’t seem like the voters there get that.